Color Icons: Written Reflection

Finishing up with the color stage of our icon process has been relieving. At the start of this entire project I was have a hard time with how well I liked my icon style. Yes, I enjoy the geometric feel of them, but as a whole I was having a hard time being confident in them. Once we started out with adding color I had a lot more fun with the idea. I added some elements to my icons that I think make them stronger as a set. I brought a lot of different ideas to the table with how I was wanting to handle my color. One of my more stronger ideas was using an overlay as a transparent or translucent effect. Another was putting a abstract jagged shape as a background color. This idea had led me back to one of my first ideas for my entire icon set, which was using a picnic blanket background as a background for my icon. I was sad when it was thrown out, but I did agree that it took away from my icons, and was some what distracting. Although, now using the color with the blanket pattern it feels different, maybe because it's a lighter color, and it's not as distracting as what the harsh black tone along with the icon would have been. I'm using this background element as an option to go along with my strongest set, which is a very simple two color fill set. For the most part, I like both a lot, but for critique I wanted to show the clearest set, and see what everyone else thought about the background element before I jumped too far into something I couldn't necessarily get out of.

After going off my two color fill set I really enjoyed working with different colors and seeing what worked best with my story connotations. Over all my color swatches that I chose worked pretty well the first time around, so that was nice to not have to pull more swatches out. I, like I've said before, was really enjoying seeing my icons in the light sky blue tone, and that is what I finalized as one of my colors. Along with a nice rich brown, and a light peach color for my three color icons.

I've learned a lot through this process. First of all, when you're dealing with a certain subject, and trying to find a good color palette look for inspiration in images, and different art dealing with the similar subject matter. I think that's what really helped with this process. I used all images dealing with different picnics, and different interpretations of picnics, such as time era. Another important thing I've learned is do more than necessary. Bring lots of iteration to the table in order to have more of selection. I of course could have done more and more with in this process, but time is also an issue, so working in time constraints as well as effectively is quite the task. Also, there are always corrections to be made, like in my first round of icons, I've changed a few of them so they could work better with eachother and get more of my point across.

Here are all of my two/three/and one color icon sets:

Three color: With background